The MMO Numbers Game

Terra Nova has an interesting discussion going, talking about what really matters when we talk about a virtual world's population. Total registered accounts? Accounts logged in since last month? Concurrent users? Interesting stuff. From the article: "In a similar vein we discussed Second Life's 100K+ members, a figure which I and others have questioned here on TN. Cory Ondrejka said that SL's 'concurrency numbers are rapidly approaching 4500, about 17,000 residents were in SL in the last 24 hours, and 50,000 in the last 30 days... If you go back even 90 days you get about 90% of the accounts having logged in.'"

Estimating numbers is tricky

[Doctor Cat]

For Furcadia, I've been trying to keep a continuously updated estimate of our total playerbase since we opened in 1996, but I've always been aware that we'll never have a totally accurate number. We can count computers connecting (not by IP address, which is often dynamic, but by keys we put in the registry on install, hardware profiles we compare to tell machines apart, etc.) but that's inaccurate because some people use multiple computers, while in other cases multiple family members or roommates log on from one computer. Characters is near useless, since we allow free alts and many people create a lot. Email addresses are worth a bit more, but have the same miscount issues that computers do. We try to use a combination of all those factors to make the best estimate we can.

Currently our max concurrent users is around 4300, and our estimate is that about 60,000 unique players log in 30 days time. So that's very much in the same ballpark as Second Life, with 4500 peak and 50,000 in the last 30 days as their estimates. I'd tend to believe those numbers. We don't have analysis on how many have been on in the last 90 days for comparison to that figure - might be worth us looking into.

I agree with the person that commented that subscription based games & free games need to be counted differently. We've actually had nearly half a million email addresses registered and millions of characters created in the last 9 years - it's easy for people to try out a free game for 5 minutes and then never come back, something you don't see in the subscription based games.

I also agree with the comment that having "shards" is, in many ways, not as desirable as having a single massive world the way that Second Life does (and Furcadia also). Both being user-created content worlds, I think they follow Bob Metcalf's law of networks - the "value" increases as the square of the number of nodes (or in this case, users). It is interesting too that in Korea, the subscription model has already largely given way to games that are free to play, but have optional things to pay for. Might become the dominant model in the US in a few years?

Note to Zonk - when's there going to be a Slashdot article about Furcadia? There's been a bajillion about Second Life already. Not that they don't deserve a lot of news coverage, but I'd like to get a smidgen too someday! Furcadia's been a user created content world where people own the copyright to their own creations since 1996, it was made by 2 people on a $50,000 budget, the programmer (me) met his fiancee' in the game (she's now our producer too), our 10th anniversary is coming up, our scripting language is cool... Do I have to hire a PR guy to send out press releases? We could use a good slashdotting someday, followed by lots of people posting here why they didn't like the game. :)